When you’re young, oh when you’re young. When you’re young really, you wear rose-colored glasses. I still do that to this day. I distinctly remember when I was putting together my first pop-up book it was an alphabet book. It was Christmas Alphabet, so there were 26 pop-ups inside. I remember thinking, oh how hard is this really going to be, right? Not having ever done this before, why I picked 26 pop-ups I have no idea.
I distinctly remember getting the few easy ones done and then quickly kind of getting caught, you know, sort of bogging down. Not so much lacking the creative idea of what I wanted to do, but the physical knowledge, the engineering knowledge of what I wanted to make happen. So that was very, very difficult at that beginning time. I remember so distinctly trying to make the snowflake in that book and thinking why won’t this do what I want it to do.
Then quickly, okay, you have to come up with something so you have to figure out how to make it do what you want to do. I also remember thinking at the time, this is the best that I can do right now. Looking back today at that book, of course I can make something much more elaborate if I wanted to. But at that time when I was, oh gosh, in my 20’s, I remember thinking, this is the best I can do with this right now because I just don’t have the knowledge or the ability to take this any further than where it’s at now.
So it was a struggle. It was a struggle not only on that level, it was a struggle for a certain level of acceptance for what I was trying to do. The publisher was great. It was with Orchard Books and Neil Porter was my editor there. He completely supported the project. He kept telling me, this is going to be a great book and everybody’s excited about it, and the sales reps are all fired up.
But unbeknownst to me, behind closed doors, the sales reps thought it was going to be a massive flop. All the pop-ups were white. What was that about? No pop-up book had ever had white pop-ups on the inside of it before. I think it was almost $20 and no children’s book had ever been $20 before. They were not anticipating any success with that title in the least. Fortunately they were proved wrong because I think sometimes we underestimate the reading community.
We underestimate the book community. We underestimate the types of things that they will take into their homes. Some of them may not necessarily love a pop-up book, but if it’s a book that they think is beautiful or interesting or they want to share it, and it happens to be a pop-up book, they’ll get it. That’s exactly what happened with Christmas Alphabet. So there were a lot of challenges involved in it. But looking back on it, I wouldn’t have done anything different.
